City Power customers able to buy electricity again after virus cleared

ANA

File image: ANA

Electricity utility City Power said on Thursday that most of the IT applications and networks that were affected by a cyberattack had been cleaned up and restored.

On Thursday morning, City Power said it had been hit by a virus, leading to a blackout of its IT systems and leaving customers frustrated at not being able to buy electricity via its website.

“Customers will be able to access vending and buy electricity. However, work is still continuing on some systems and applications that were affected including the uploading of invoices by our suppliers, and logging faults by customers on the website,” spokesperson Isaac Mangena said.

“This will also affect our response time to logged calls as some of [the] internal systems to dispatch and order material have been slowed by the impact.”

City Power has created temporary measures and alternatives for customers. Mangena said customers may not be able to use the website, as such they are requested to log calls on their cellphones using www.citypower.mobi.

“Suppliers seeking to submit invoices for payments should rather bring their invoices physically to City Power offices in Booysens. New service connections were not affected by the cyberattack,” said Mangena.

“City Power cybersecurity is currently investigating the cause of this attack. Ransomware virus is known globally to be operated by syndicates seeking to solicit monies. We want to assure residents of Johannesburg that City Power systems were able to proactively intercept this and managed to deal with it quicker.”

Mangena said customers should also not panic as none of their details were compromised. They apologised for the inconvenience this has caused to the people of the City of Johannesburg.

He promised that if everything goes well operations should be back to normal by the end of Thursday.

– African News Agency (ANA)

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